Why I Hate Abercrombie & Fitch

Essays On Race and Sexuality

Dwight McBride

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780814756867
• eBook ISBN: 9780814761236
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Discrimination & Race Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

Reflections on the ways discriminatory hiring practices and racist ad campaigns seep into American life

Why hate Abercrombie? In a world rife with human cruelty and oppression, why waste your scorn on a popular clothing retailer? The rationale, Dwight A. McBride argues, lies in "the banality of evil," or the quiet way discriminatory hiring practices and racist ad campaigns seep into and reflect malevolent undertones in American culture.

McBride maintains that issues of race and sexuality are often subtle and always messy, and his compelling new book does not offer simple answers. Instead, in a collection of essays about such diverse topics as biased marketing strategies, black gay media representations, the role of African American studies in higher education, gay personal ads, and pornography, he offers the evolving insights of one black gay male scholar.

As adept at analyzing affirmative action as dissecting Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, McBride employs a range of academic, journalistic, and autobiographical writing styles. Each chapter speaks a version of the truth about black gay male life, African American studies, and the black community. Original and astute, Why I Hate Abercrombie & Fitch is a powerful vision of a rapidly changing social landscape.

Part I Queer Black Thought

1 Straight Black Studies

I speak for the thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of men who live and die in the shadows of secrets, unable to speak of the love that helps them endure and contribute to the race. Their ordinary kisses of sweet spit and loyalty are scrubbed away by the propaganda makers of the race, the “talented Tenth” . . .

The Black homosexual is hard pressed to gain audience among his heterosexual brothers; even if he is more talented, he is inhibited by his silence or his admissions. This is what the race has depended on in being able to erase homosexuality from our recorded history. The “chosen” history. But the sacred constructions of silence are futile exercises in denial. We will not go away with our issues of sexuality. We are coming home.

It is not enough to tell us that one was a brilliant poet, scientist, educator, or rebel. Whom did he love? It makes a difference. I can’t become a whole man simply on what is fed to me: watered-down versions of Black life in America. I need the ass-splitting truth to be told, so I will have something pure to emulate, a reason to remain loyal.

—Essex Hemphill, Ceremonies

The sexual question and the racial question have always been entwined, you know. If Americans can mature on the level of racism, then they have to mature on the level of sexuality.

—James Baldwin, Conversations with James Baldwin

This chapter is in large measure descriptive in its efforts to account for a phenomenon that has been part of African Americanist discourse for as long as the study of African Americans has been of any public and institutional significance—that is, its heterosexist strain. It is also, in part, analytical, due to its efforts to describe this phenomenon by attempting to provide a usable past for black queer studies. I begin by framing its concerns with a brief interpretive gloss of Essex Hemphill’s remarks in the above epigraph. From there, I move to consider the motivations of the heterosexist strain inherent in much of African Americanist discourse. This leads me to a brief reading of James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room as a text that provides both a challenge to traditional modes of analysis for African American literary production and suggests a broadening of what African Americanist critique might mean. This suggested broadening leads me to a consideration of the critical sensibility we have come to call black queer studies, with some attention paid to the challenges it poses to dominant constructions of African American studies as an institutional formation.

In the above epigraph, taken from Essex Hemphill’s short but strident personal essay, “Loyalty,” included in his book Ceremonies, Hemphill aptly describes not only the predicament of the black homosexual in dominant articulations of the African American community, but also goes far toward metaphorically describing the relationship of black queer identity to dominant articulations of the proper object of the analysis that has congress under the rubric of African American studies—that is, a race-centered understanding of blackness, in Hemphill’s words, “riddled with omissions” (70). Indeed, elsewhere have I seldom witnessed such a fierce insistence on the impossibility of disarticulating race and sexuality as Hemphill provides in this essay. Journalistic in tone, laced with a poet’s diction and phrasing, shockingly sexual, unapologetic about the centrality of sexual pleasure, politically strident (even bordering on sermonic), and all under the mockingly simple title “Loyalty”—Hemphill’s essay is keen to demonstrate how the very models of intervention into racial discrimination at the heart of the analysis represented by African American studies are themselves committed to the flattening out of (if not the evisceration of) queers or queer sexuality and the challenges they pose to the heterosexist construct that is “the African American community.”

Consider for a moment the rhetoric of Hemphill’s essay itself: “We will not go away with our issues of sexuality. We are coming home.” This rhetorical construction depends upon the separation of black gays and lesbians from the location of “home,” which he posits they are “coming home to.” This rendering of home as a site of contestation—as opposed to the “welcome table” or “comforting” characterization of home associated with the most dominant, public, and politically salient renderings of the African American community—signals the terms of the relationship of black queer subjectivity to African American identity for Hemphill. Indeed, “home” (a term to which I will return later) is the very nexus that has to be rethought. For Hemphill, nothing less than the “ass-splitting truth” will give him something “pure to emulate, a reason to remain loyal.” In this appeal for a reason to remain loyal, the writer simultaneously recognizes the political need for the grand unifying category of “the African American community” even as he presses (to the very threat of disloyalty) for a more inclusive version of it.

Also noteworthy in Hemphill’s essay is the sarcasm with which he represents “the propaganda makers of the race, the ‘Talented Tenth’”:

Men emasculated in the complicity of not speaking out, rendered mute by the middle-class aspirations of a people trying hard to forget the shame and cruelties of slavery and ghettos. Through denials and abbreviated histories riddled with omissions, the middle class sets about whitewashing and fixing up the race to impress each other and the racists who don’t give a damn. (70)

In reading this essay, I feel not altogether unlike Farah Griffin who, in the course of her search for a usable past for black feminism, arrived at her critical investigation of the sexism of W. E. B. Du Bois (a recognized early male proponent of black feminism).¹ For Hemphill, surely one of the great progenitors of black queer studies, is not without his own limitations, either. Two features of Hemphill’s complaint stand out in this regard: 1) the exclusivity (or specificity) of his complaint is made on behalf of gay black men, with no explicit recognition of black lesbians, and 2) the way in which he locates the black middle class as the bearers of the ideology or politics of black respectability fails to recognize the dissemination of such ideology beyond the boundaries of that strict class construction. Still, black respectability can be said to be not only at the heart of Hemphill’s critique of the African American community’s conservatism, but also—as my coeditors and I argue in our 2002 literature anthology, Black Like Us: A Century of Lesbian, Gay and Bi-Sexual African American Fiction—at the heart a usable past for black queer studies as one of the primary objects of its analysis.²

For our purposes, Kali Gross, following the work of Evelyn Brooks Higgenbotham, characterizes black respectability in the following manner:

Historically, as a form of resistance to the negative stigmas and caricatures about their morality, African Americans adopted a “politics of respectability.” Claiming respectability through manners and morality furnished an avenue for African Americans to assert the will and agency to redefine themselves outside the prevailing racist discourses. Although many deployed the politics of respectability as a form of resistance, its ideological nature constituted a deliberate concession to mainstream societal values. The self-imposed adherence to respectability that permeated African American women’s lives, as well as African American culture, also later impacted African American activism and the course of scholarship in African American Studies. This strict adherence to what is socially deemed “respectable” has resulted in African American scholars’ confining their scholarship on African Americans to often the most “heroic,” and the most successful, attributes in African American culture; it has also resulted in the proliferation of analyses which can be characterized as culturally defensive, patriarchal, and heterosexist.³

Indeed, the politics of black respectability, understood in this way, can be seen as laying the foundation for the necessary disavowal of black queers in dominant representations of the African American community, African American history, and African American studies.

This chapter, then, represents a set of concerns about the related state of African American studies, the state of Baldwin scholarship, the complicated relationship Baldwin exhibits to identity politics, and how that complexity presages the need for a critical sensibility I align with black queer studies. Indeed, we are in a moment now when this critical sensibility called black queer studies is self-consciously in search of a usable past to define and clarify the significance of its arrival onto the scene in its current incarnation. This is evidenced by a proliferation of recent work produced at the margins of race and sexuality. Its most self-conscious manifestations to date, perhaps, come in the form of the extraordinary Black Queer Studies conference organized by E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G. Henderson at UNC–Chapel Hill in April 2000 (and a volume of essays coedited by Johnson and Henderson that is being published as a result of that event), as well as a special issue of the journal Callaloo, coedited by Jennifer Brody and myself titled “Plum Nelly: New Essays in Black Queer Studies,” which was launched at that same historic conference. After the Black Nations/Queer Nations conference held in New York City in 1995, the UNC conference represents the single most significant gathering of this kind to take place in the country.⁴

In my treatment of Baldwin to follow, I do not want to suggest that there have not been figures other than Baldwin who might serve as models in our search for a usable past for black queer studies. Quite the contrary, this is more of a call to further work, further intervention into and interpretation of the past of black queer studies and of the object of its analysis. In fact, one colleague responding to an earlier version of this essay usefully suggested that by moving my discussion beyond Baldwin to the generation of writers preceding him (Hughes, Locke, McKay), I might avoid essentializing black gay subjectivity.⁵ My colleague’s concern took me back to the process of conceptualizing Black Like Us with my coeditors, as we worked to construct a narrative for the tradition of queer African American literature (a term about which there will doubtless be much more dissent and drama—evidenced already in the process of obtaining permissions to reprint excerpts from certain living writers and the estates of certain dead writers who have had problems with the book’s subtitle).⁶ We decided that the important distinction we wanted to make with Baldwin as a kind of transition figure from that earlier generation of writers in our narrative of this literary tradition was in marking Baldwin as the first “openly gay” black writer. That is, he was the first to talk publicly about his homosexuality and purposefully to make use of it in his fiction. In an interview from the latter years of his life (captured in Karen Thorsen’s 1989 documentary James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket), when asked to reflect upon why he chose so early on to write Giovanni’s Room given that he was already dealing with the burden of being a black writer in America, Baldwin’s response is instructive:

Well, one could say almost that I did not have an awful lot of choice. Giovanni’s Room comes out of something that tormented and frightened me—the question of my own sexuality. It also simplified my life in another way because it meant that I had no secrets, nobody could blackmail me. You know . . . you didn’t tell me, I told you. [My emphasis.]

This is not the same, of course, as saying that Baldwin embraced gay sexuality as associated with the gay liberation movement, to which he had a rather complicated relationship. Still his public “outing” of himself we regard as significant not only to the development of this particularized tradition of queer African American fiction, but also as posing a challenge to dominant, respectable, sanitized narratives of the African American literary tradition and what it can include.

My claim, in this regard, is, perhaps, finally a modest one: that the state of critical discourse which proceeds under the rubric of African American studies, with its narrow-minded embrace of a race-centered identity bias, does so at the expense of other critical forms of difference that are also rightly constitutive of any inclusive understanding of black subjectivity. Perhaps one of the clearest challenges to this kind of thinking that privileges “race” (specifically here racial blackness) as the logos of African American studies can be witnessed in the example of James Baldwin’s life and work—and particularly in his second novel, Giovanni’s Room. Through a brief consideration of Baldwin’s relationship to questions of identity (both his own and his rep­resentations of it), we will come to see that his logic is emblematic of long-silent but real complexities and challenges to dominant constructions of the field of African American studies itself.

Given the advent of cultural studies in the academy—with its focus on interdisciplinarity or transdisciplinarity, critical theory, and an ever-broadening notion of “culture”—it seems more possible today than ever before to engage a prophetic Baldwin in all the complexity he represents to critical inquiry by considering the various roles he has occupied. Baldwin was no more content to be simply a black writer, a gay writer, or an activist than he was to write exclusively in the genre of the novel, drama, poetry, or the essay. And the topoi of his work and the landscape of his critical and creative imagination are broad, to say the very least.

Scholarship, however, has often tended to relegate Baldwin to one or the other of these identities, rather than moving our thinking—not only of Baldwin but of African American studies generally—in a direction that speaks to the intricate social positions African Americans occupy. This is largely because the trend in scholarship itself—prior to the advent of cultural studies—was ostensibly to identify a particular theme, a category, or a political ideology at work in a text or across an oeuvre in order to fix that variable as part of the process of examining the work in question. Neither Baldwin’s life nor his work is easily given over to such an approach. Try following, for example, the deployment of a single idea like “home” or “nothingness” in the context of Giovanni’s Room (as Kathleen Drowne does in her recent essay “‘An Irrevocable Condition’: Constructions of Home and the Writing of Place in Giovanni’s Room”) and one begins immediately to perceive the difficulty of reading Baldwin in such a manner. Ideas, even in the realm of his imaginative representations, are rarely static for him. Rather, they are drawn to reflect the complex experience of these ideas in our lives. This represents, perhaps, one of the reasons that the critical legacy on Baldwin’s work has been relatively sparse, when viewed in proportion to his voluminous contribution to African American letters.

That is not to say that Baldwin “the man” has not been of great interest, nor that he has not appeared often in epigraphic and aphoristic ways. Bald-win’s words have been used in the work of film directors ranging from Marlon Riggs to Spike Lee, alluded to and cited in popular black gay fiction of the likes of James Earl Hardy’s B-Boy Blues, and quoted by notable African American cultural critics and race men of the likes of Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Cornel West. Still, what has gone missing is sustained, critical engagement with Baldwin’s content in the thoroughly active way that the criticism has continued to engage Richard Wright, for example. This is a point that echoes with more than a little déjà vu, since a similar claim was forwarded by Trudier Harris in her groundbreaking study Black Women in the Fiction of James Baldwin. In 1985 Harris wrote:

On occasion I was surprised to discover that a writer of Baldwin’s reputation evoked such vague memories from individuals in the scholarly community, most of whom maintained that they had read one or more of his fictional works. When I began a thorough examination of Baldwin scholarship, however, some of that reaction became clearer. Baldwin seems to be read at times for the sensationalism readers anticipate in his work, but his treatment in scholarly circles is not commensurate to that claim to sensationalism or to his more solidly justified literary reputation. It was discouraging, therefore, to think that one of America’s best-known writers, and certainly one of its best known black writers, has not attained a more substantial place in the scholarship on Afro-American writers.

It is interesting to observe that in 1985 Harris could still note with authority her supposition that many read Baldwin for the “sensationalism” he and his work represented. What Harris starts to recognize here implicitly I want to be more explicit about. That is, Baldwin was read in part because for his exceptionalism, aberrance, difference from other black writers. Baldwin provided a generation of African American and non–African American readers alike with characters who were racialized, sexualized, and class inflected in complex ways; so much so that at times, in Baldwin, a reader almost yearns for an overdetermined, naturalistic protagonist like Richard Wright’s “Bigger Thomas” that one can hold on to. But perhaps this point only arcs toward a larger one that will need to be fleshed out in a longer-term research project that would address the larger question of the relationship between African American literary criticism and the state and progress of racialized discourse in America over time.⁷ I say all this here simply to make the point that cultural studies work and black queer studies work has shown that it is possible to think critically about African Americans and African American culture without simply essentializing the category of racial blackness, appealing to outmoded and problematic notions of an authentic blackness, or fixing, reifying, or separating race, gender, and sexuality in the name of their political serviceability to racial blackness. With the advent of cultural studies, it seems finally possible to understand Baldwin’s vision of and for humanity in its complexity, locating him not as exclusively gay, black, expatriate, activist, or the like, but as an intricately negotiated amalgam of all of those things, which had to be constantly tailored to fit the circumstances in which he was compelled to articulate himself. The transdisciplinary quality of the intellectual work most closely associated with cultural studies has made it possible for those open to its lessons and trained in African American studies to arrive at a critical sensibility—the emergent black queer studies—that can begin the difficult process of thinking about the ways in which race and sexuality are so deeply imbricated.⁸

I want to suggest first—following a reading that is taken from an essay of mine first published in Callaloo in 1998 titled “Can the Queen Speak?”—that although Baldwin’s work challenges static notions of racial identity, his awareness of the hegemony of the category of race in black anti-racist discourse nevertheless limits the terms of his possible identifications with his gay sexuality. And second, I want to briefly sketch a reading of Giovanni’s Room that suggests that it is Baldwin’s understanding of these same identificatory limits that necessitate the whiteness of the characters in that novel, for reasons having to do with its broad, forward-looking, prophetic project.

Let us begin with the following question: What happens discursively when a gay black man takes up the mantle of race discourse? In Thorsen’s 1989 documentary of Baldwin’s life, there are at least two moments to which I want to call attention by way of addressing this question. The first is a statement made by Amiri Baraka, and the second is a statement made by Baldwin himself from television interview footage. I turn to these less literally textual examples to demonstrate that in our more casual or less scripted moments, our subconscious understanding of the realities of race discourse is laid bare even more clearly.

Baraka’s regard for Baldwin is well documented by the film. He talks about how Baldwin was “in the tradition” and how his early writings, specifically Notes of a Native Son, really impacted him and spoke to a whole gener...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction: The New Black Studies, or beyond the Old “Race Man”
• Part I Queer Black Thought
• Part II Race and Sexuality on Occasion
• Part III Straight Black Talk
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author